Domestic Violence Survivor Explains Why Guns Don’t Actually Protect Women: ‘I Was Shot With My Own Gun’

BY TARA CULP-RESSLER/Think Progress

Domestic violence survivors are traveling to Capitol Hill this week to make sure that firearms don’t end up in the hands of abusers. Working in conjunction with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, they’re encouraging lawmakers to support comprehensive background checks, a lobbying effort that’s timed to coincide with the end of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Gender-based violence and gun policies have become particularly entwinedlately. Over the past several months, proponents for looser gun laws have argued that women need easy access to guns to protect themselves against abusers and rapists. According to some of the conservatives who oppose gun control, additional regulations on concealed weapons and assault rifles aren’t compatible with feminism. On Tuesday, that line of reasoning made yet another appearance at a Senate hearing about Stand Your Ground laws, as a conservative policy analyst from the Cato Institute suggested that feminists support the policy that allowed George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager.

Christy Salters Martin, a domestic violence survivor who was stabbed and shotby her husband after she attempted to leave him, has a very different perspective on the issue.

“Having a gun isn’t enough,” Christy explained in an interview with ThinkProgress. “Women who fear for their life don’t need a gun — they need to go to their local police department, they need to go a family member, they need to go to the domestic violence shelter in their area where they have some type of protection.”

Christy and her estranged husband both owned guns and both had concealed carry permits. Christy also had a very successful career in professional boxing. That didn’t stop her husband from shooting her.

“I was shot with my own gun. Just putting a weapon in the woman’s hand is not going to reduce the number of fatalities or gunshot victims that we have,” Christy pointed out. “Too many times, their male counterpart or spouse will be able to overpower them and take that gun away.”

The evidence backs up Christy’s point. Abusers who have access to a gun aremore than seven times more likely to kill their partners. By some estimations, the presence of a gun in domestic violence situations — no matter who technically owns it — increases the risk of homicide by 500 percent. In 2011, 44 percent of the women in this country who were killed with guns were murdered by a current or former intimate partner.

“These things are going to continue to happen until Congress steps up and changes these laws,” Christy told ThinkProgress. “And in order for them to act, it’s going to take people like me, survivors, to stand up and say: Be more aware of the gun laws.”

Thanks to current loopholes in federal law, some domestic abusers are still able to get their hands on guns. That’s what Christy and her fellow survivors want to change. They’re holding a press conference on Wednesday to urge Congress to pass stronger background check measures, saying that will help save women’s lives. Indeed, in states already require background checks for all gun sales, 38 percent fewer women are killed by intimate partners.

Immediately after the Sandy Hook massacre, support for universal background checks soared. An estimated 90 percent of American voters supported the policy in the lead-up to a Senate vote on the issue in April; nonetheless, the Senate ended up killing the bill. But Christy is still hopeful.

“It’s just going to take more people getting up there and talking about their personal experiences,” she said, pointing out that more stories from victims of intimate partner violence need to be elevated. “If it’s not happening in your house or within your family, you’re not thinking about it.”

Aside from raising awareness about gun violence prevention, Christy and her fellow survivors are also doing their part to help destigmatize the issues surrounding domestic abuse. Even though intimate partner violence is incredibly widespread in the United States, most people still don’t feel comfortable talking about it. One recent survey found that 64 percent of Americans agree that talking more about these issues would make it easier for them to feel comfortable stepping in and trying to help someone in the midst of an abusive relationship.

Maddow to gun nuts: Violent threats are ‘not how we do things in this country’

By David Ferguson/Raw Story

Wednesday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow talked about the fact that in certain factions of the American right, the answer to increased concern over gun violence has been to threaten more violence. Many of the people who adamantly support guns, for some reason, can’t seem to stop threatening to shoot the people who don’t. But while people may enjoy saying that sort of thing, Maddow said, it’s not how change happens in our nation.

She began by discussing the failed U.S. Senate run of erstwhile Nevada candidate Sharron Angle. Angle was believed to be a shoo-in for Sen. Harry Reid (D)’s Senate seat representing the state of Nevada. Except that Sharron Angle harpooned her own candidacy by going around talking about “Second Amendment remedies” to when conservatives lose elections.

“Second Amendment as in Second Amendment,” said Maddow. “Americans are going to shoot our way out of the political problems that we have with the Congress.”

That meant, Maddow said, “if Americans with guns did not succeed in voting Harry Reid out of office, they would turn to another way of doing it. They would use their guns to get their way instead! Nevada was not amused,” and Angle lost to Reid in November of 2010.

“2010 was also the year those angered by the passage of Obamacare decided to organize retaliation and resistance against those votes in Congress in the form of rocks thrown through the windows of Democratic Party offices,” she continued, including the office of Arizona’s Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) was was critically injured in a gun attack in early 2011.

“You do not get far in this country using tactics like that,” Maddow said. “It is a tactic and it recurs in different debates at different times, but it doesn’t work. It’s not a tactic that works for good reason, we do not settle arguments by physical force of arms, not since, oh, an important time in the 1860s.”

When the NRA unveiled its new PR initiative, “Operation School Shield” at the National Press Club on Wednesday, its representatives did so under the watchful eye of 20 or so “ostentatiously armed men.”

“According to the Washington Post,” Maddow said, “The NRA supplied roughly one armed guard for every three reporters. Some of the guards had their weapons plainly exposed, others just had obvious bulges under their suit jackets. Quote, ‘It was a spectacle the likes of people who work at the National Press Club have never seen before.’”

These shows of force and bullying, however, said Maddow, are not how you affect change in this country. There are better ways.

She then rolled footage of Nicole Hockley, mother of 6-year-old Dylan Hockley, who was killed in the Newtown shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Hockley was meeting with Connecticut Rep. Tim Larson (D) to talk about gun control legislation in the state.

In the early hours of Thursday morning, Connecticut lawmakers passed one of the toughest sets of gun safety laws in the country.

“It’s the way this country works,” Maddow said. “You make your case, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. That is the way that it worked in Connecticut today with this bipartisan, huge vote, a bipartisan overhaul of that state’s gun laws following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which, of course, is in Connecticut.”

She chided those who would bully and threaten their way to getting what they want, like the men who showed up with assault rifles at a Mothers Against Gun Violence rally and surrounded the protesters.

“Nobody can hear what you’re saying when you are shadowing a peaceful mom protest with a loaded assault rifle,” she concluded. “Your effort to intimidate drowns out your own words. It’s not how we do things in this country.”

Watch the video, embedded below via MSNBC:

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STUDY: States With Loose Gun Laws Have Higher Rates Of Gun Violence

By Zack Beauchamp/Think Progress

The National Rifle Association (NRA) and its allies in Congress frequently claim that gun violence is highest in places with the toughest crime laws. But a new study from the Center for American Progress (CAP) suggests something closer to the opposite is true — the states with laxer gun laws tend to be the ones contributing the highest shares of national gun deaths and injuries.

The authors of the report, called “America Under The Gun,” developed a list of ten indices of gun violence, ranging from gun homicide levels to firearm assaults to crime gun export rate (the number of guns sold in that state used in crimes around the country), and ranked each state from 1-50 along each index. They then took the average of each state’s ranking to determine its overall level of gun violence relative to other states. Lousiana was the highest, with an average of fifth-worst across all ten indices, while Hawaii’s 45.4 ranking was the best.

A statistical regression comparing these rankings with strength of gun law found a correlation between weak gun laws and violence levels as measured by the 10-index average. Comparing a state’s relative ranking in strength of gun law (as judged by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence) to a state’s relative gun violence ranking yielded clear evidence that states with looser gun laws contributed more to the national gun violence epidemic:

While many factors contribute to the rates of gun violence in any state, our research clearly demonstrates a significant correlation between the strength of a state’s gun laws and the prevalence of gun violence in the state. Across the key indicators of gun violence that we analyzed, the 10 states with the weakest gun laws collectively have a level of gun violence that is more than twice as high—104 percent higher—than the 10 states with the strongest gun laws.

Here is the map:

The CAP report’s finding is yet another contribution to a growing body of empirical evidence that strong gun laws work. A prior, less comprehensive study also established links between gun deaths and loose gun laws. After Missouri repealed its background check law, gun homicides went up 25 percent despite a national and regional decline. Three independent papers have found that counties with more guns have higher rates of gun death.

The NRA has long attempted to use Congressional funding restrictions to cripple research on gun violence on grounds that it “may be used to advocate or promote” new gun laws.

How Raising The Minimum Wage Could Reduce Gun Violence In Chicago

By Annie-Rose Strasser/Think Progress

It may be possible to help reduce gun violence in Chicago — a city that saw over 500 homicides last year — in one simple step: Raising the minimum wage.

A new report released by the group Stand Up! Chicago draws a clear connection between violent crime and low wages and economic inequality in the Windy City, and while raising wages alone can’t eliminate the gun violence that haunts the city’s streets, it could certainly help, the group asserts:

Decades of research have demonstrated that there is a statistically significant link between low wages, income inequality and crime. Researchers have found that the majority of increases in violent crime can be explained by downward wage trends, and The National Bureau of Economic Research reports that a twenty percent drop in wages leads to a 12 to 18 percent increase in youth crime.Other analysis shows that a 1 percent point increase in the Gini index (a measure of wealth inequality) produces, on average, a 3.6 percent increase in the homicide rates for a population.[...]

Much of Chicago’s poverty crisis is attributable to the problem of low wages and unemployment. According to a recent report by Women Employed and Action Now, the number of low-wage workers in Chicago, defined as those making $12 per hour or less, increased by nearly 30 percent over the last decade.

According to the report, 89 percent of murders and violent crimes in Chicago were in low-income areas where mostly black and Latino people live — areas where wages are lowest and extreme poverty rates are highest. Overall, the city has income inequality similar to that of El Salvador. That follows the wider national trend that poverty and income inequality results in homicides:

Raising wages won’t just be beneficial to the lives and wallets of Chicago’s poor; it will also help the city overall. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that the financial cost of the gun epidemic — between hospital bills, time spent in courts, people leaving the city, and a range of other factors — costs households about $2,500 each year. The Center for American Progress has calculated the direct costs per capita at $390 in Chicago. And homeowners could benefit from a reduction in gun violence too, since housing prices would rise by billions if fewer people were getting gunned down.

Republicans Blame Video Games, Not Guns, For Gun Violence

By Annie-Rose Strasser/Think Progress

Republicans are more likely to place the blame for gun violence on video games, not guns, according to a recent poll from Public Policy Polling. Sixty seven percent of Republicans believe that such games are a “bigger safety threat” than firearms — only 14 percent think the reverse.

The only problem? There’s no data to support that position. There is evidence that limiting access to guns can help limit violence wrought by those machines. In particular, there’s evidence to show that the Assault Weapons Ban helped to limit gun violence on the Mexican-American border. And in states where gun ownership is high and gun laws are lax, violence rates are higher.

On the other hand, there’s absolutely no conclusive evidence showing that video games are the root cause of violence. There are countries with much lower rates of violence that havemuch higher consumption of video games.

Texas man guns down couple over dog poop on his porch

By David Edwards/Raw Story

Police say a 75-year-old man in Dallas is being charged with Capital Murder after he allegedly shot and killed two neighbors because they had dumped dog feces on his porch.

According to The Dallas Morning News, Chung Kim had repeatedly complained to management at Sable Ridge Apartments that Michelle Jackson and Jamie Stafford, who lived above him, had dumped dog feces on his porch and allowed their dog, Selena, to urinate on the upstairs balcony which dripped down to his patio.

Tension finally boiled over on Monday when Kim was on his patio and shot 31-year-old Jackson multiple times as she stood on the patio above him, police said. He then reportedly went upstairs and shot Stafford, who was also 31, as he was trying to escape. After Stafford fell from the second floor, Kim is accused of going back downstairs and shooting him again.

I heard about eight or nine gunshots just go off, ‘Bow, bow, bow,’ like three separate times,” resident Michael Issa told KXAS. “It was like, first there was two or three, then there was a pause for like 30 or 40 seconds and then there was another three or four shots, and there was a pause, and a couple more shots.”

“I waited for like three or four minutes and I ain’t hear nothing. I came outside to smoke a cigarette and look upstairs and there’s feet hanging over my head,” he recalled.

Resident Yoland Washington said that three of the couple’s children were away from home at the time of the shooting, but an infant had been in the apartment.

“When they come home today, their mother and their father is gone,” Washington lamented. “Little baby — they call the newborn Little Mama — Little Mama is not going to never know her parents. She’ll never know her parents. Never.”

I heard about eight or nine gunshots just go off, ‘Bow, bow, bow,’ like three separate times,” resident Michael Issa told KXAS. “It was like, first there was two or three, then there was a pause for like 30 or 40 seconds and then there was another three or four shots, and there was a pause, and a couple more shots.”

“I waited for like three or four minutes and I ain’t hear nothing. I came outside to smoke a cigarette and look upstairs and there’s feet hanging over my head,” he recalled.

Resident Yoland Washington said that three of the couple’s children were away from home at the time of the shooting, but an infant had been in the apartment.

“When they come home today, their mother and their father is gone,” Washington lamented. “Little baby — they call the newborn Little Mama — Little Mama is not going to never know her parents. She’ll never know her parents. Never.”

Neighbors told the Morning News that Jackson had volunteered about 30 hours a week for AmeriCorps VISTA, helping to combat poverty. She also tutored disadvantaged children through the nonprofit Dallas Community Lighthouse.

Local AmeriCorps director Keven Vicknair said that Jackson had been going to school for a degree in education.

“She was really happy she was going back to school,” he explained. “It’s insane that this happened to her [when] everything was looking up. She was great.”
Child Protective Services took temporary custody of the 1-month-old child, but all of the children are now staying with relatives. The couple’s dog is being adopted by a neighbor.
Watch this video from KTVT, broadcast Feb. 4, 2013.

Sen. Alexander: Video games a bigger problem than guns

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story

Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said Wednesday that violent video games were a bigger problem than guns in the United States.

When asked on MSNBC about proposals to reduce gun violence, such as requiring universal background checks, Alexander indicated that he was skeptical of the legislation.

“I’m going to wait and see on all of these bills,” he said. “I think video games is a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people. But the First Amendment limits what we can do about video games,  and the Second Amendment to the Constitution limits what we can do about guns.”

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre has also blamed violent video games — along with music and movies — for the gun violence in the United States.

“There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people, through vicious, violent video games with names like ‘Bulletstorm,’ ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ ‘Mortal Kombat,’ and ‘Splatterhouse,’” LaPierre said after the tragic Newtown school shooting in December.

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

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Virginia Governor McDonnell Wants More Guns In Schools

By Josh Israel/Think Progress

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) became the latest anti-gun control figure to embrace the notion that the best way to protect against future tragedies like Newtown, Connecticut, is to put more guns in public schools. In his monthly “Ask the Governor” segment on WTOP radio, McDonnell endorsed the idea of arming adults in schools.

Asked about allowing school officials to have guns, McDonnell said it is a “discussion that is probably timely.” He explained:

McDONNELL: I know there has been a knee-jerk reaction against that, I think there should at least be a discussion of that. If people were armed, not just a police officer, but other school officials who were trained and chose to have a weapon, certainly there would be an opportunity to stop aggressors trying to come into the school, so I think that’s a reasonable discussion that ought to be had.

Listen to the audio (h/t: ProgressVA):

While several pro-gun lawmakers have indicated that they will reconsider gun control in the wake of Friday’s tragedy, some are using the tragedy to push for even more guns. McDonnell joins Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) and Republican legislators in Oklahoma, Nevada, and South Dakotain embracing the idea of arming adults in schools.

Stories of gun violence dominate headlines

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Obama: AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not criminals

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story

President Barack Obama on Wednesday night vowed to do everything he could to prevent “not just of gun violence but violence at every level” in the wake of the Colorado theater mass shooting.

“I think we recognize the traditions of gun ownership that passed on from generation to generation, that hunting and shooting are part of a cherished national heritage,” he said in New Orleans at the Urban League Convention.

“But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals. That they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.”

The July 20 massacre in Aurora, Colorado left 12 people dead and wounded 58 others. The suspected gunman, James Holmes, entered the packed midnight showing of the Batman filmThe Dark Knight Rises and threw two canisters of tear gas before firing into the crowd with an AR-15 assault rifle.

“Our hearts break for the victims of the massacre in Aurora,” Obama said. “We pray for those who were lost and we pray for those who loved them. We pray for those who are recovering with courage and with hope. And we also pray for those who succumb to the less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities in so many cities across the country every single day.”

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

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